. Propositional Attitudes . Attitude Ascriptions

Verbs like 'believes, ' 'knows, ' 'suspects, ' 'hopes, ' and 'worries'—verbs that, at the level of logical form, can take 10 clauses as their complements—are generally taken to denote intentional attitudes borne to a proposition. For this reason they are known as propositional attitude verbs. It is difficult to construct a semantics and prag-matics adequate to the features of these verbs. Any successful theory must explain why, within the scope of an attitude ascription, substitution of coreferring terms sometimes seems to change the truth value of the ascrip-tion. is feature of attitude ascriptions seems to entail that coreferring terms can have different semantic 15 values; other compelling arguments seem to show that coreferring terms must have the same semantic value. Aer surveying other important features of propositional attitude verbs, and presenting several coreference puzzles, this article discusses conceptions of mental content intended to help resolve such puzzles. It then explores the importance of subjective uncertainty to attitude ascriptions and to formal semantics in general. It concludes by sketching an approach to the semantics of attitude ascriptions that coheres with the standard 20 ways of representing subjective uncertainty. is approach also unies the treatment of coreference puzzles and the treatment of presupposition carrying expressions in attitude ascriptions. Attitude ascriptions include sentences like () Liem hopes that Santa is coming soon. 25  () He suspects that Santa will give him a rocket. () Some children worry that if Santa gets lost, the reindeer won't know how to nd their house. ese sentences have the form 'NP VPs that φ, ' where 'VP' denotes some intentional attitude, and (bracketing the question of its denotation) 'that φ' is a nite clause headed by a complementizer. Attitude ascriptions come in many other forms, of course. But everyone agrees that ()–() represent the 30 sort of claim we are aiming to give a semantics for when we give a semantics for attitude ascriptions in general. It is very common to think that any semantics for attitude ascriptions presupposes a theory of the relations that believers bear to propositions—abstract objects that represent or embody truth-evaluable intentional content. ese relations are commonly called propositional attitudes. e nature 35 of propositions and the nature of the relations we putatively bear to them is hotly debated. So it is helpful for certain purposes to explore the features of attitude ascriptions without making substantive presuppositions about propositions and propositional …